It's been quite a year for iOS. Jony Ive's redesign shook things up, but developers once again stole the show, taking the Helvetica Neue Light ball and running with it. From slick, minimal buttons to beautiful fonts and menus, 2013 was the year iOS apps fully matured and finally left its iPhone OS roots behind. So without further ado, here are my favorite designs of the past 12 months.

Google formed with an internal motto of "Don't Be Evil" in response to the perceived business practices of Microsoft, and then proceeded over the years to manipulate customer data (see what Google does when you search) and force software on users (see how you are already signed up for Google+) much like Redmond. Now the Mountain View company is taking hypocrisy to a new level with their latest lawsuit against the Apple- and Microsoft-led Rockstar Consortium. Ah, the irony!

This past year has been full of courtroom drama for Apple, and we've done our best to keep you up to speed each week in our Law & Apple column. From the hot mess of a trial against the Justice Department regarding eBook conspiracies, to the ongoing Patent Wars with Samsung, to the zany lawsuits brought by people trying to get rich quick. Suffice it to say, there has been no shortage of material. But which stories did you like the best? You might be surprised.

It's easy to write off 2013 as a year without any real design innovations. The first great smartwatch is going to have to wait till next year — sorry, Samsung and Pebble — and we didn't get a new Apple product that wasn't a riff on a previous one. And Google didn't make any headway with Glass.

But it wasn't a lost year by any stretch. We might not look back on 2013 as the watershed year that 2007 was, but even without a big bang, there were a number of advancements that made us look, touch and think just a little different.

Newspapers and magazines have always been about content, but somewhere along the way it got lost in a sea of flashy graphics and one-your-face advertisements. But the new generations of tablet publications are working hard to strip away the clutter and open up a whole new world of reading on our iPhones and iPads, even if we have to use Newsstand to get to it.

Even more than its trademark lowercase "i," Apple's surnames come with certain expectations. Air implies tremendous lightness and thinness. Mini means small, but not less. And Pro is the absolute cream of the crop, the finest mix of power and performance money can buy.

The iPad is only a post-PC device if you're a person who isn't looking for the "incredibly great computer in a book" that Steve Jobs predicted three decades ago. It may be true that people are buying a lot fewer PCs, but anyone who uses a Mac for something their iPad can't do — serious photo editing, design work, video rendering, etc. — has probably bought one within the last year or two. For them, a true post-PC device hasn't really been made yet.

An electrical engineer filed a lawsuit against Apple in California, claiming that he invented the smartphone and Apple was infringing on his idea. The jury sided with Apple, but it wasn't as clear-cut as you might think. Was this another case of a patent troll trying to score big against Apple, or was it a case of a deep-pocketed corporate behemoth crushing the little guy? Read on.

For most of 2013, we've been reading about Apple's supposed decline. As the weeks ticked by without any new products to speak of, the discontented din grew louder, declaring innovation was dead in Cupertino, with the ghosts of the iPhone and iPod forever haunting the halls at 1 Infinite Loop.

If its critics would do a bit of homework, they would see that Apple's innovations aren't born out of thin air; they follow a pattern of intense focus and fine-tuning. In short, Apple looks to its own products for inspiration.

You probably remember the WWDC demo. Under the biggest spotlight on the grandest stage, Anki co-founder and CEO Boris Sofman unrolled an 8-foot mat and introduced the world to a new kind of gaming experience, one where the cars are real, but the reality is still virtual.

"If you look at toys from 20 years ago and compare them to toys today they are, minus a few differences, pretty much the same thing," said Hanns Tappeiner, co-founder and president of Anki. "We saw a big gap between (toys and video games) and we thought we could use robotics and AI to bridge that gap, to combine real physical things with some of the things we love about video games. And that's what we did with Anki Drive."